Some Aspects of the Public Service

MR. LAWSON: Before introducing our Guest of Honour I would like to acknowledge one sin of omission which I have committed all too consistently during this past year. (Assuming, of course, that one can commit an omission and, in addition, do it consistently.) I refer to my neglect of our radio listeners. I must confess that when our season started last fall I was scarcely aware that the sphere of influence of The Empire Club extended beyond these four walls, and it is only during the past few months that it has gradually dawned on me that these meetings are attended, not by hundreds, but probably by thousands. Some of our speakers have been tremendously gratified by the response they have received from all over the province, and both the C.B.C. and the Club are constantly getting little notes of appreciation through the mail. So, when I say "members and guests of The Empire Club", I mean both those who are able to be with us in the flesh and also those who are with us in spirit only.

We have with us today a great Canadian. A native of Victoria, British Columbia, a graduate of the University of Toronto and of Oxford, a member of the Ontario Bar, a former teacher at Ridley College, Lieutenant-Colonel in the Canadian Intelligence Corps, Chairman of the Ontario Highway Transport Board, and Judge of the Supreme Court, he is now the Chairman, since July 1st, 1959, of the Civil Service Commission of Canada. Clearly he brought to his new post an outstanding academic background and a wealth of experience.

The yearbooks of The Empire Club already record three addresses by Sam Hughes but these were delivered by Sir Sam Hughes, the grandfather of our present speaker who served as Minister of Militia and Defense during the First World War. It is a pleasure to present the worthy scion of a great family, the Hon. Samuel Hughes, O.C., who will speak to us on "Traditional Aspects of the Public Service".

THE HONOURABLE S. H. S. HUGHES: It is now nearly fifty years since my grandfather addressed this Club, and he did it almost at the high noon of that spirit in which the Club was conceived and founded. In the decade before the Great War of 1914, the power and the glory of the British Empire were not open to question. The sacrifice and exhaustion of two world wars in defence of causes which were then and still are believed to have been right and just, had not taken their effect upon a political organism which was generally in these latitudes believed to be the quintessence of western civilization and the principal manifestation upon earth of the rule of law and a service which is perfect freedom. The liberty of the subject, as yet untrammelled by emergency war-time legislation and the controls and taxation which were to accompany it, was everywhere extolled as the birthright of the British born. Glory and disillusion were to follow in full measure, and many honourable men were to seek a solution of their difficulties in the deliberate dissolution of the imperial organization upon the territories of which it was proudly maintained that the sun never set. It is not very long since we believed that the way of life and the political system which flourished in the British Empire, as we then knew it, would be perpetual, and if one takes a long and searching look back over the centuries of human history from the point of vantage, if vantage it is, which we now occupy, the words of the poet laureate of that era, the late Rudyard Kipling, have all and more of the significance which they enjoyed when he first wrote them.

"Cities and thrones and powers Stand in time's eye
Almost as long as flowers, Which daily die.
This season's daffodil, She never hears
What change, what chance, what chill Cut down last year's;
But with bold countenance And knowledge small Esteems her seven days' continuance To be perpetual."

These were the days when the Colonial Laws Validity Act was still in force, when the Statute of Westminster was still many years from enactment, and when two generations of Canadians had not yet gone forth gaily and with high courage to seal their allegiance with their blood and to raise their country to a position of esteem and confidence in the councils of the world. I am inclined to think that the great sentimental uprising of our people from coast to coast in two world wars has had more to do with the achievement of nationhood in Canada than the earnest consultations of constitutional lawyers and the deliberation of parliaments could ever have achieved. It is even possible that the endeavours of those of our fellow citizens who seek to remove from our national flag any reminder of the tradition and the loyalties which inspired the sacrifices of the past will not add to the stature which we have now attained. There is authority for the proposition that the creation of strange emblems, be they golden calves or synthetic flags, do not of necessity make a nation great. Its name and its fame must be recorded in the words of Joseph Howe, speaking of his own, "on the hills and valleys of the country which God has given us for inheritance and must live, if it lives at all, in the hearts of those who tread them."

But if now a seemingly unbridgeable gulf opens between ourselves and the thought and feeling of fifty years ago, if we find ourselves spiritually as well as geographically placed between two great and alien contending powers, having to assert ourselves daily with a new and distasteful querulousness where formerly no assertion was necessary, we have still much to look back to, and still more to carry forward towards the uncertain horizons of the future. As Saint Paul said about Tarsus, we are citizens of no mean city. It is no doubt presumptuous of me, in the presence of this historic society, to make rueful reflections upon the altered national or international scene. There is an old and pregnant saying that a cobbler should stick to his last. But as a lawyer, and a public servant, I feel that I am on firm ground if I permit myself some observations upon the great debt, never to be discharged, which we owe to our forefathers in the field of law and government. It has become a commonplace to celebrate the glorious legacies bequeathed to us by the once vital and dominant societies of Athens and Rome. Attic literature and philosophy, Roman law and language, are the common heritage of western civilization, and if indeed all too few of us now devote our intellectual energies to these benefits which have been bestowed upon us, none of us here have been untouched by those great secular strains of our common Christian culture.

This is not the time nor the place, nor am I the appropriate person to deliver a lecture on the influence of British thought and action in the fields of law and government in the world as it exists today. Perhaps only a passing reference to the jury system of trial in criminal cases and government by representative assemblies will be sufficient to illustrate my thoughts. These have become a commonplace in the free world and among many races and in many climes far removed from the cradle of the British race. Many countries where parliamentary institutions, modelled on the British system, where alone they were indigenous, were regarded as the summit of achievement in the 19th and 20th Centuries, have since receded into the impenetrable darkness of Communist domination. There is, however, an aspect of this development on which I would like to dwell at some length--an aspect, indeed, of which little is known by the public, although a good deal of light has been thrown upon it by historians in recent years. This is the development of the administrative side of the Government of England and later of the United Kingdom from the small and purely personal ecclesiastical staffs of the medieval chancellors down through the period when expanding commerce and enlarged military commitments made necessary the slow but steady development of the numbers of the professional servants of the Crown.

It was no accident that medieval government fell almost entirely into the hands of clerics, who were, indeed, the only literate element in the early medieval community, and the close connection between the word "cleric" and the word "clerk" and the dual meaning of their common adjective "clerical", is a continuing reminder of this feature of the origins of our Civil Service. Later, in the 16th and 17th Centuries, administration was confined largely to the personal retainers of the Kings of England and of the great officers of state, such as the Lord High Steward and the Lord High Admiral, and long after the Royal Palace of Whitehall has ceased to exist the name remains to designate a street in the City of Westminster which is synonymous with British Government and the British Civil Service. Those of you who are familiar with the life of Samuel Pepys will have acquired a vivid picture of a competent and, by contrast with his contemporaries, a thoroughly honest public servant wrestling with the problems of naval administration in the second half of the 17th Century. Behind my desk in my office in Ottawa is a painting of William Pitt, first Earl of Chatham and the first Paymaster of the Forces who scorned to accept as his own personal perquisite interest paid on the huge sums on deposit for the payment of British soldiers and sailors in the mid-18th Century. To this great architect of empire we owe an even greater debt than arises from his organization of the victories of Wolfe at Quebec and Clive at Plassey, with which his name will be forever linked. By his self-denial in an age of general corruption, the Great Commoner, as Pitt was known, spoke clearly to the hearts of the English people with much greater force and effect than was ever exerted by one of his famous declamations in the House of Commons. It is a nice illustration of the maxim that "actions speak louder than words".

Although progress towards purity of conduct by public servants was no doubt continuous and received fresh stimulus from the example of the younger William Pitt, who after a lifetime in office as the architect of our successful resistance to the continental tyrant of his day, Napoleon Bonaparte, died as he had lived, a man of modest means whose debts were paid posthumously by his friends, it seems to me that the greatest leap forward occurred after the Indian Mutiny of 1857. For two and a half centuries British commercial and political interests had been represented in India by the East India Company, which had gradually assumed control over the whole huge sub-continent. The nabobs, as they were called--the company's servants and directors who survived the appalling climate and who returned to England after a few years with immense fortunes wrung by extortion and peculation from the Indian princes and the Indian trade. These were familiar figures in 18th-Century England, and their mansions still decorate the English towns and countryside. As a result of the mutiny the company's political power was extinguished and the Government of India brought entirely under the Crown. There then began that period of ninety years during which the Indian Civil Service established an unparalleled record of integrity and devotion to duty, culminating in the unique renunciation of 1946, greatly to the material profit of the people of India, and indeed of the people of Great Britain, but not of the individual members of the Service who were fortunate if they reached retirement on pension in some English sea-side town.

It may be objected that too much emphasis can be placed upon the experience of the Indian Civil Service. Two years before the Indian Mutiny, the Civil Service of England, after many enquiries, was placed under the examination system, and the old system of nomination (very much akin to what we call patronage) began to fall into disuse, although it lingered on in, of all places, the Foreign Office, modified by the practice of that department only accepting nominees of impeccable education and origins. But from this time on, as the second British Empire grew upon the enormous industrial expansion of Great Britain, the standards of the British Service, both at home and abroad, were raised and perfected to cope with the task of imperial administration.

I remember when I was at Oxford University in the autumnal period of imperial greatness between those two world wars in which the Empire survived and indeed triumphed in part because of its imperial form and ability to draw human and material resources from the ends of the earth, the Civil Service of the Empire was at the height of its prestige in popularity with the cultivated youth of Great Britain. Academic standards, for entry into it, were high, and although the prestige of the home service was formidable, the attraction of the Indian Civil Service, the Sudan Civil Service and the Colonial Civil Service--to name them in the order of prestige and difficulty of entry--was very great to that class of young men who felt that their economic and social privileges could only be justified by their willingness to serve the state. This tendency to exalt service to the state, at the expense of participation in trade and manufacturing, is almost incomprehensible to us, and I shall have more to say about it in a moment. It was, however, so highly developed in my experience that had the opportunities of such service not been sharply curtailed since the last war, the present economic revival of Britain, thoroughly grounded on a period of self-inflicted austerity, might not have taken the form it has. But this is not my theme. The fate of the Indian, Sudan and Colonial Services is only too plain. The other day I entertained at lunch a charming and amiable native of Nigeria who was my counterpart in the western provincial administration of that country, soon to become independent of British rule and to take its place, and one hopes a lasting place, in the Commonwealth of Nations. He told me that about half of the British Colonial civil servants at present in the country were expected to leave with pecuniary compensation for their broken careers. Those who remained he referred to as the "expatriates", and I gathered that this was a term which generally applied to those whose lot was cast in these far off places and who were prepared to "stand the hazard of the die". What a word, I though to myself, pronounced with sincere but none the less condescending pity over those whose youthful ardour had dedicated their lives to the service of king and emperor, queen and empress, in the remote equatorial lands, and who would remain in growing isolation intensified by every form of hostile propaganda and doubtless given good riddance by the patriots of Trafalgar Square and all the other busybodies around the world who are experts in everybody's business but their own. Expatriates indeed! For whatever one may think of the great constitutional experiment which is turning the colonial empire into a coterie of sovereign states, an experiment so benevolent that even the cynics have not yet succeeded in reducing to the proportions of their own minds, this experiment, however it may exemplify the true mission of a civilizing colonial power, is none the less hazardous for those men and women who must now choose between their allegiance and their chosen careers. Not since the Roman Legions left Britain over fifteen hundred years ago has a community of sometime conquerors been faced with such a dilemma. We may well have reached the position foreshadowed by the prescient poet, for there is a strain of clairvoyance in all poetry:

"Far-called our navies melt away
On dune and headland sinks the fire,
And all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre."

I have spent some time in trying to suggest the traditional background of the British Civil Service at home and abroad, chiefly because I think that for us in Canada this traditional background is an important heritage and will become of ever increasing importance as the political cohesion of the Commonwealth and Empire diminishes. We should look for a moment at the atmosphere of public service in the United States of America, which has come to be generally accepted since the war as the head and front of the western world in terms not only of actual power but of willingness and ability to extend material and cultural aid to countries less advantageously situated. That the principal western powers should co-operate in this work is absolutely essential if the tremendous pressure of population which has occurred during the last generation and will be intensified many times during the next, is to be prevented from destroying the good life as we in relatively rich and under-populated countries know it. I think it is fair to say that one of the reasons for the creation of the United States was the fact that 18th-Century standards in British administration were unequal to the task of administering the wealthy and turbulent communities which British emigration had created on the Atlantic seaboard of North America, and that the founders of the United States looked forward to an improvement in these standards among themselves once independence had been achieved. It is perhaps a daring thing to make generalizations about American history, but since we are accustomed to thinking of the early Americans plunging straight into the middle of the disastrous spoils system where all public servants were nominees of the victorious political parties of the day and, without any hope of permanence, sought security in widespread plunder from day to day, such was really not the case until the Federalists and Whigs were overwhelmed by frontier democracy in the early 19th Century.

But it is the complete domination of patronage in every branch of the Public Service of the United States for half of the 19th Century, more than the painful but steady struggle out of the mire of that woeful period since its closing decade, that has coloured our ideas of American public life for over a century. We can say with some truth that the influence of the United States upon the development of the Civil Service in Canada has been wholly negative. The American example was the great bugbear, and even during that period when the "malign influence of patronage", as Sir Robert Borden called it, was at its strongest, we in Canada were disposed to congratulate ourselves upon the shining purity of our public life compared to the welter of corruption which existed south of the border.

It would be pleasing to speculate on the traditional influences which may have descended to us from the old regime in French Canada, but I doubt if any useful illustrations can be drawn. The civil law we still have, to enrich our jurisprudence, but all trace of the administrative system of the Bourbons has departed and we have been spared the dead hand of the Napoleonic bureaucracy which has worked with singular success to set itself apart from the thoughts and feelings of the ordinary citizen of France. Moreover, our French compatriots in Canada have had a longer and more continuous experience of the development of parliamentary and administrative techniques in this country than that of the combined ancestral experience of most of us in this room and indeed in this Province, and would not be gratified by the suggestion that our Canadian institutions, both parliamentary and administrative, upon which they have exercised so much influence, are nothing but a convenient formula imported from the British Isles.

One of the first preoccupations of the new federal government of Canada was the problem of finding a solution of its administrative needs. The system of colonial administration prior to Confederation had not been animated to any great extent by the new spirit of the Civil Service in the mother country. It was realized, however, by Sir John A. Macdonald, that master of political reality, that standards must be created for entry into the Service of the new government based on the long run upon the same considerations that prevailed in Great Britain and not in the United States. We sometimes forget the strength of the feeling of our forefathers in favour of the former and against the latter. The turbulent republic had recently almost dissolved in fratricidal civil war. Its western frontier, its relations with the Indians, its internal politics, and above all its menacing attitude towards the security of Canada and Canadian loyalty to the Crown, filled them with dread and dislike. It was realized that entry into the new Service must be based on merit, however much at variance with the old colonial system of patronage this might seem to be, and the first Statute of 1868 set up a system of Civil Service examinations on what was hoped was the British model. Here indeed desire outran performance for many years, and ways were sought and found of evading the spirit of the legislation, rude and elementary as it was, since the examinations were merely designed to test the fitness of the nominees of Ministers of the Crown. In 1882 a new Civil Service Act was passed, establishing a separate Civil Service board to examine candidates and draw up a list of those qualified, from whom appointments might be made. A wide area of choice was therefore left to the appointing department, and indeed little was accomplished in the way of prohibiting political activity by civil servants or protecting them from political reprisals. This situation was partly remedied, at least as far as the inside Civil Service at Ottawa was concerned--by the Statute of 1908, which established the first Civil Service Commission with power of appointment and provided for the first time for competitive examinations as a means of entry.

Two world wars have exercised a profound effect upon Civil Service administration. The first provided such an unexpected and uncontrollable influx into the Service that the existing machinery, based upon the Act of 1908, broke down completely and the Act of 1918, under which we still operate, was the result. Passed by the Coalition Government of 1917, and not opposed in principle by any party, this statute applied the principle of competitive examination to the whole of the Civil Service of that day, and vested in an independent Civil Service Commission the power of appointment and promotion. Almost equally important, it vested in the Commission the power to classify the Service in an orderly manner and imposed upon it the duty of superintending the organization of government departments and of making all recommendations in matters of Civil Service pay. Ever since the Civil Service Act of 1918 was passed, it may be said that political patronage as it was known has completely disappeared from the Civil Service of Canada. Perhaps a more insidious form of patronage, which can be conveniently described as "departmental patronage", is more difficult to eradicate because in many respects it is an unconscious process and is based upon the principle of "better the devil you know than the devil you don't". It has been the constant care of the Civil Service Commission in recent years to guard against departmental favouritism in matters of appointment and promotion and to check the tendency, wherever possible, for the Civil Service to expand in the hands of energetic and ambitious officials.

But in spite of all the vigilance that could and can be exercised, government agencies continue to proliferate, and this process received a remarkable stimulus during the Second World War. As in the case of the First War, the needs of the government to recruit large numbers of civil servants on an emergency basis far outran the capacity of the Commission's regular recruiting machinery, and under the general provisions of the War Measures Act a vast cloak was thrown over these operations, preventing both scrutiny and criticism and engendering a tendency to disregard the letter of the law. No one will say that in a time of national emergency drastic steps should not be taken, as indeed they were taken in both of these great conflicts to satisfy the requirements of the State, but it is undeniable that, having developed techniques in conflict with the provisions of the Act under the sanction of war-time emergency legislation, there has remained a strong tendency to disregard these provisions ever since. The whole apparatus and atmosphere of government at Ottawa suffered from the untrammelled authority which was put into its hands in these days of crisis, and the provision of a new Civil Service Act to meet the needs of a changed and expanding nation is long overdue. Also, it seems to me there has been an unfortunate tendency in the past to regard the Civil Service Act as engraved on tablets of stone, not to be discussed or amended if at all possible. There is, I think, a new spirit abroad at the present time and the Civil Service is about to be exposed to the most searching scrutiny, a scrutiny, I venture to say, which no responsible member of the Service will be afraid or reluctant to endure.

I think it will be appreciated by you that, in spite of all temptations and many setbacks, there has been a steady movement throughout our history as a nation to base the selection and promotion of civil servants upon the principle of merit. In this, I think our public men have been generally in advance of the opinion of a very large portion of their fellow citizens. Few men and women in Canada, perhaps few even in this room and within the sound of my voice, genuinely believe that appointments to the Federal Civil Service are not influenced by political considerations or obtained by the help of powerful allies. This reluctance to believe what is in fact the truth is nourished, of course, by every unsuccessful applicant who believes that his own sterling qualities have been ignored by the examiners because of some unworthy preference given to a friend of the powers that be. This is just an example of the general human tendency to believe rumour rather than fact, and to cherish illusion rather than reality.

It would be wrong to over-emphasize the influence of tradition upon the development of our modern Civil Service by indicating that we have now the same product as exists in Great Britain at the present day. There have indeed been divergences from the British pattern, characteristically Canadian. One has been, in my opinion, unfortunate in its results but perhaps inevitable, and I refer to the failure of the Civil Service Commission in the years after the First War to establish high academic standards in examinations for entry to the Service. This is one of the real glories of the British system which we have been unable to acquire by either inheritance or emulation, and I think the explanation may be found in the fact that we have not developed the proper sense of dedication to the service of the State which is a tradition in so many British circles and families. We have not, of course, had the historical experience of a leisured class which looked upon public service in some capacity as a duty and a distinction. This feeling has enabled the Civil Service examiners in Great Britain to make their examinations a real test of scholarship and judgment. I do not say that here in Canada these qualities are not appreciated. Indeed, we comb the country, in competition with many other institutions, for recruits of the highest academic distinction, but all too frequently we find ourselves with too few recruits of this type. Our own examinations are by no means negligible, but they have tended to become mechanical--better suited (and here I will be in trouble with the highly-trained people who devise them) to the assessment of mechanical aptitudes than in measuring the human intellect.

You will say that the solution is easy; raise your standards for entry in the administrative groups of the Service and pay more money--above all, pay more money, to make the Service more attractive and defeat your competitors in the field of recruitment. It seems to me that there is something distinctly immoral about this suggestion. There we sit in Ottawa with all the taxpayers' money at our command, and nothing except our sense of the fitness of things and indeed of trusteeship to prevent us from making the Civil Service of Canada so well paid as to be irresistible to those in particular to whom good pay is irresistible. No government should thus require the confidence of its taxpayers or attempt to compete on unequal terms in the market for talent. The solution must be sought in a higher standard of education produced by a higher standard of living and an increased sense of awareness among those who have flourished in Canada, of the needs of Canada in the field of government administration.

One final word about tradition. There is a most useful and salutary tradition which is part of our parliamentary institutions and which protects the civil servant from criticism in Parliament of his actions and his advice. Here the head of the department, a Minister of the Crown, takes all responsibility for the activities of his staff, and is the only legitimate object for attack. The advantages of this tradition are obvious. Without it, governments would only get from their professional advisers the type of advice which they wanted to hear and to support in the House of Commons. The independent, unprejudiced position of the Civil Service, upon which the security of the State so largely depends under our democratic system of government, would be fatally compromised. It is therefore very disturbing to see the development of a tendency to agitate rather than discuss, to substitute the waving of placards for the ordinary processes of rational thought, to circularize Members of the House of Commons with petitions and diatribes, and generally to prefer abuse to the language of persuasion. This is not only not characteristic of the best traditions of the Service and of the principles of the great majority of the men and women who compose it, but by injecting the subject of agitation into the political arena it threatens the existence of the principle to which I have alluded, and may cast aside the shield which custom has interposed between the Service and the people whom it serves. It is sometimes said that by imposing a restriction upon the political activities of civil servants they have been branded as second-class citizens. Let those who make these allegations consider how this wise restriction, based also upon tradition, has put civil servants in a position of unassailable strength. No career is more honourable--no livelihood more secure. Let those who seek to make a career out of agitation and unrest beware how they turn their backs upon the temperate and wholesome traditions of the past.

THANKS OF THE MEETING were expressed by Mr. James H. Joyce.